ABSTRACT
Municipal Solid Wastes (MSW) management involves serious environmental impacts, namely the production of complex effluents—the leachates. These effluents, resulting mainly from the wastes deposition in sanitary landfills, possess a complex and recalcitrant composition and represent a significant source of pollution, presenting an accumulative, threatening and detrimental effect to the survival of aquatic life forms and ecological balances. This paper presents the current situation regarding the effluents generated from municipal solid wastes management in Portugal. The study presented, which began in 2015, refers to the situation in Portugal in 2014. The results and conclusions obtained, based on the available information, allowed the characterization of the effluents produced at the Portuguese MSW management sites, the identification of the treatments currently applied and the destination of the treated effluents.
